Fiction - I - J

In this section we'll keep you up to date with news of books you might be interested in. The information will come from the publishers' website and we will add our reviews as often as we can.

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The Camel Trail

Judy Jackson

Marsons ISBN 9780951722022

March 2007

The Levy family kept notebooks and accounts going back to 1840. The story of their lives is dotted with extracts from these journals, giving brief descriptions of the food they ate. As in real life, both happy and tragic events are often bound up with memories of family meals. For the Levys food was more than just a necessity; it was an integral part of their existence, of their place in society.

The Camel Trail is a startling first novel, based on a true story.

It is 1944. Anna Grant inherits a strange legacy from her mother, Dina: a treasure retrieved from a disaster in the Middle East, and a pile of yellowing notebooks . The handwritten pages hint at a world of elegant Victorian tables and lavish balls. Yet behind the apparent calm in the family lies a story of deception and betrayal.

Anna searches for the truth about her grandfather David Levy. What was the catastrophe that left him orphaned in 1837? What brought his seemingly happy marriage to the brink of collapse? She retraces journeys, following a trail from Safed to Gibraltar, from London to Lisbon. While Anna uncovers layers of joy and sadness, revealing the reason for her mother’s repressive behaviour, she copes with her own eccentric husband and the problems of bringing up a child in wartime Britain. But it is the final journey that unlocks the mystery of inherited misery. In her search for the origin of the treasure, Anna uncovers a secret that tormented David all his life.

The novel is an exploration of the author's roots - beginning in Safed in the 1830s and moving through Gibraltar, London and Lisbon. A set of authentic notebooks hints at the lives of David Levy and his family, though the intrigue and mystery surrounding his life is revealed gradually, ending in the discovery of a secret that affected the lives of three generations.

The author is food writer and novelist Judy Jackson. She has written seven books on food, one of which sold over 40,000 copies. She has produced freelance pieces for many national newspapers, including The Times, The Independent, The Evening Standard and The Telegraph. She writes restaurant reviews for Time Out (Eating Out in London).

The Finkler Question

Howard Jacobson

Bloomsbury ISBN 9781408808870 

August 2010

MAN BOOKER PRIZE WINNER 2010

Julian Treslove, a professionally unspectacular former BBC radio producer, and Sam Finkler, a popular Jewish philosopher, writer and television personality, are old school friends. Despite a prickly relationship and very different lives, they’ve never quite lost touch with each other – or with their former teacher, Libor Sevcik, a Czech always more concerned with the wider world than with exam results.

Now, both Libor and Finkler are recently widowed, and with Treslove, his chequered and unsuccessful record with women rendering him an honorary third widower, they dine at Libor’s grand, central London apartment. 

It’s a sweetly painful evening of reminiscence in which all three remove themselves to a time before they had loved and lost; a time before they had fathered children, before the devastation of separations, before they had prized anything greatly enough to fear the loss of it. Better, perhaps, to go through life without knowing happiness at all because that way you have less to mourn? Treslove finds he has tears enough for the unbearable sadness of both his friends’ losses.

And it’s that very evening, at exactly 11:30 pm, as Treslove, walking home, hesitates a moment outside the window of the oldest violin dealer in the country, that he is attacked. And after this, his whole sense of who and what he is will slowly and ineluctably change.

The Finkler Question is a scorching story of friendship and loss, exclusion and belonging, and of the wisdom and humanity of maturity. Funny, furious, unflinching, this extraordinary novel shows one of our finest writers at his brilliant best.

The Act of Love

Jonathan Cape  ISBN 9780224086097

September 2008

Felix Quinn calls himself a happy man. He runs one of the oldest antiquarian bookshops in London and his wife, Marisa, is unfaithful to him. All husbands, Felix maintains, secretly want their wives to be unfaithful to them.
Felix hasn't always thought this way. From the moment of his first boyhood rejection, surviving the shattering effects of love and jealousy had been the study of his life. But an event occurs while he is honeymooning with Marisa in Florida that changes all that. At a stroke he goes from dreading the thought of someone else's hands on the woman he loves to thinking about nothing else. From now on he is jealousy's slave and will know no peace until his wife betrays him, and then betrays him again. But how can it be called betrayal if it is what he wants?
Enter Marius into Marisa's affections. And now Felix must wonder if he really is a happy man.
This is a story about agony-addiction; but it is also about the nature of desire itself, the exquisiteness of loss, and the universality of the impulse - whether a jealous husband's or an avid reader's - to play the voyeur, to probe and question, to want to know, day after day, page after page, who is doing what to whom and what will happen next.

Shocking, unashamedly perverse, mordantly funny, and at the last heartbreaking, The Act of Love tackles one of the last taboos of the erotic life. No husband who reads this novel will ever feel the same about his wife again. And no wife will be sure she really knows her husband.

Kalooki Nights

Howard Jacobson

Vintage ISBN 9780099501367 

 Life should have been sunny for Max Glickman, growing up in Crumpsall Park in peacetime, with his mother’s glamorous card evenings to look forward   to, and photographs of his father’s favourite boxers on the walls. But other voices whisper seductively to him of Buchenwald, extermination, and the impossibility of forgetting.

 Fixated on the crimes which have been committed against his people, but unable to live among them, Max moves away, marries out, and draws cartoon histories of Jewish suffering in which no one, least of all the Jews, is much interested. But it’s a life. Or it seems a life until Max’s long-disregarded childhood friend, Manny Washinsky, is released from prison. Little by little, as he picks up his old connection with Manny, trying to understand the circumstances in which he made a Buchenwald of his own home, Max is drawn into Manny’s family history – above all his brother’s tragic love affair with a girl who is half German. But more than that, he is drawn back into the Holocaust obsessions from which he realises there can be, and should be, no release.

There is wild, angry, even uproarious laughter in this novel, but it is laughter on the edge. It is the comedy of cataclysm.

The Mighty Waltzer

Vintage 9780099274728

"One disillusionment at a time" is the principle behind Jacobson's telling of a youth suspended between ping pong and masturbation, mortification and omnipotence, anti- Semitism and the Akiva gang. At the Akiva club, Walzer comes into his own: he's a natural, with the makings of a "star" (even if he is stoned by the "prefab boys" on his way there). At home, he's caught between the flamboyance of his market-trader father--the "swag", and swagger, he wants to pass on to his son--and his mother's famous "reserve". Balancing the split legacy--win or lose? laugh or cry? put up or shut up?--is part of the pain, and pleasure, of the book. No surprise, perhaps, that Walzer is unwilling to make a clear distinction between the two. When it comes to sex and friendship, family and history, life and ping pong, The Mighty Walzer is a brilliant story of one man's journey to the realm of "pain fun": the pleasure of a life spent losing and learning what you can ask for.

Everything Passes

Gabriel Josipovici

Carcanet ISBN-10: 9781857548501  

Everything passes. The good and the bad. The joy and the sorrow.
Everything passes.

Or does it?

A man stands at a window, looking out. Behind him, a room, bare of people and of furniture. Fragments of conversations drop into his head, conversations with his first and second wife, with his children, with his friends. A life can slowly be pieced together, culminating in a terrifying near-death experience.

Gabriel Josipovici has created a compressed, poetic narrative of solitude, love, illness and the ambiguous comforts of art. As clear and elusive as the arts it explores, this is the most beautiful and mysterious of Josipovici's books to date.

Dropped From Heaven

Sophie Judah

Shocken Books ISBN 9780805242485

March 2007

A marvelous fiction debut–a collection of richly told, deeply moving stories about everyday life within a community of Indian Jews as its ancient culture confronts the modern world.

In the mythical village of Jwalanagar, the Jewish traditions of the Bene Israel have survived for more than two thousand years, but the twentieth century brings with it modernity and cataclysmic political change. In these nineteen interconnected stories–by turns insightful, humorous, and heartbreaking; poignant, gentle, and searingly sad–we follow this community across the years as its way of life is forever altered.

In “Hannah and Benjamin,” the parents of a young woman are shocked when she defies their rejection of the man she wishes to marry–but no more shocked than the man himself. In “Nathoo,” a kindly Jewish soldier and his wife adopt a Hindu boy orphaned in the post-independence violence of 1947–with disastrous results. In “Dropped from Heaven,” a mother with three unmarried daughters at home and a copy of Pride and Prejudice in her handbag springs into action when she hears that two single brothers are coming to town looking for brides. And in “Old Man Moses,” a lonely and imperious old man is visited by his Israeli grandson and the young man’s girlfriend, and finds that there is still a place in his heart for love.

Sophie Judah tells these stories in a wonderfully fresh and original voice, and gives us a fascinating look at an ancient, vibrant community that now exists only in memory.

Sophie Judah was born in India in 1949 and immigrated to Israel in 1973, where she lives with her husband and five children.

The Inheritance

Peter Stephan Jungk

Pushkin Press ISBN 978190654209

November 2009

Daniel Loew, a poet based in London, has been told since childhood

that one day he would become his wealthy uncle's only heir. When he learns of his uncle's death, in Caracas, a few weeks have since passed. A close friend of his uncle's tells Loew that he alone has been named executor of the will and blocks Loew from receiving his inheritance.
In a harrowing chase from Venezuela to Miami, via Hamburg and Panama City, on a background of political upheavals as Hugo Chavez attempts and fails his 1992 military coup, Loew leads a desperate fight to regain his considerable inheritance.


Peter Stephan Jungk was born in 1952 in Los Angeles and raised in several European cities. Since 1988 he has been living in Paris and works as author, film script author, translator, and essayist. He is the author of eight books, including the acclaimed biography Franz Werfel: A Life from Prague to Hollywood (1990) and the novels The Snowflake Constant short-listed for the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize (Faber and Faber, 2002), and The Perfect American (Handsel Books, 2004), a fictional biography of Walt Disney's last months, which is being turned into an opera by Philip Glass.